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Sheryl Sandberg and Technology's Female Leaders
AlistairCharlton writes "While the rest of the world continues to see men dominating, the technology industry seems set to change that. I investigate how Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Meg Whitman and Joanna Shields are paving the way for the rest of the business community. From the article: 'A glance at the male/female split of world leaders (178/17), Fortune 500 CEOs (96 percent/four percent) and FTSE 100 board seats (85 percent/15 percent) reveals there is a huge imbalance between the sexes, but in technology change is underway - and Sandberg is at the very forefront of it. Along with Meg Whitman, Marissa Mayer and Joanna Shields of HP, Yahoo and London's Tech City respectively, Sandberg represents a shift in what was not so long ago an all-male industry.'"
for being sociopathic, greedy CEOs and politicians, only then will we have equality.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Don't forget Carly Fiorina and her contributions to making HP and Compaq the successful companies they are today.
Job such as teaching is female dominated = women's brains have evolved to be better at certain things.
Negative role such as being in prison is male dominated = men's brains are different.
Positive role such as winning sole custody of one's children is female dominated = women will always be better are certain things.
Job is male dominated = men and women are equals.
It's femilogical, and you're being sexist if you don't agree.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
I'm betting Carly can't make a good sandwich ether.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Surprising that this article praises the disaster that is Meg Whitman, and completely omits Ginni Rometty the current CEO of IBM who has worked everywhere within the company over 30 years and has CS and EE degrees.
The rest of us just don't care about the gender of who successfully runs a company.
Only when they unsuccessfully run it does someone get their panties in a knot by playing some imaginary gender card.
The majority "Don't give a fuck." I don't see too many men (or women) complaining that only women can give birth.
You go girl. Best known for her groundbreaking leadership on which project again? Don't be afraid to be bossy. Buy my book.
As opposed to blacks, Asians, or other minorities in those positions; we should focus on women, because white women are surely more oppressed than them.
Need I point out that the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action has been white women.
Female executives for a company that just happens to be in tech, doesn't count to women in tech, just women in business.
Let us not forget though that tech used to have a larger female representation then it does today. So when we are back to the ratio we had in the 80s and push beyond that, THEN we can start patting ourselves on the back.
... which has had all female CEOs since 2001.
Xerox is not as exciting as HP, but its CEOs have not done large, showy reorganizations that destroyed once-proud solid engineering traditions, so there's that.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
She's practically an argument against letting women be in charge of anything outside of a kitchen. And not one of those fancy restaurant kitchens.
But I'll be fair, the rest of HP's CEOs lately haven't been much better.
Yeah. She was a micro manager.
Once during an interview, the interviewer said in an accusatory tone, "It's been said that you didn't pay attention to day to day activities."
She responded with, "I did." and so forth defending herself with examples on how she was there looking over day to day activities of the business.
That was the WRONG answer. CEOs are supposed to be big picture people - long term strategy: understand the markets, the industry, the economy - NOT day to day happening in the business. The President and underlings worry about day to day activities.
So yes, she belonged in the kitchen making sammiches and getting beers.
Work bottom-up, don't approach it top-down.
Just having female leaders is worthless if those leaders aren't any more responsible than the male leaders who preceded them. It's about responsible leadership not male to female ratios.
Now there's a good looker in those IBM ads im seeing on the right hand side of slashdot..
Really now IBM? That is the best looking Female engineer you have to sell your products? Jesus you guys need to have lunch with Bob Parsons - Minus the cocaine of course.
Really not trying to be sexist here which is the first problem. It's really difficult to address the difficulties pertaining to male vs. female co-workers/bosses when the core issues are so deeply ingrained in the differences which make it sexist.
I think I just gave myself a migrain.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Maybe a decade ago and after enough beer...
I prefer women medical doctors - and I'm a guy.
Women seem to listen more, understand more and I have had better outcomes with them.
Yeah, I have no data to back up my claims. It's just my experience.
Although, I once had an embarrassing moment when the female physician was checking my genitals. Trying to integrate x^2 + y^3 + ln(z) dxdydz doesn't work, btw. She was quite certain that I don't need Viagra.
Of "you can work 200 hour weeks if you sleep under your desk" (while at google) and more recently "no more telecommute" (at yahoo) fame?
Is that someone to be praised, regardless of gender?
I think she belongs on the "stay away form wherever she works" list.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
perhaps we could see what the females on slashdot think? *crickets*
I'm betting Carly can't make a good sandwich ether.
...and I bet when she was three she dreamt she could save Mario from Donkey Kong. Like that could ever happen!... Oh, wait...
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/345409
I got a migrain just trying to figure out what you were not trying to say while simultaneously trying to say something.
So... you've never been married, then?
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
A significant amount of the smart, talented women I know despise working for other women because female managers can be awful to women in a way that many men cannot even dream of treating female subordinates. Even in college, I saw some of this as one female professor was known to be utterly ruthless to female students who slacked off to a degree she almost never, ever dished out to her male students.
So I look forward to this trend with amusement because it very well may lay the foundation for an implosion of female involvement in our fields. And then the cycle will repeat itself...
a woman taking over a company created by a man won't really be seen as dominating. Domination is seen when you create something game changing and steer the industry in a certain direction, not when you take over a healthy company and keep it that way or attempt to rescue a dying one.
Women will be seen in the same light as men once they create something like microsoft, google, or facebook to name a few and canive their way to the top.
This morning on Morning Edition NPR broadcast a talk with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. (Probably because Sandberg has a new book out on the subject.) I thought it was quite interesting.
But CEOs/COOs are not really that humble.
Carol Barth did well running Autodesk. Not so well at Yahoo, but that was Yahoo's problem. Nobody else has been able to turn around Yahoo either.
This morning on Morning Edition NPR broadcast a talk with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. (Probably because Sandberg has a new book out on the subject.) I thought it was quite interesting.
On the other hand this book also got Gloria Allred on the warpath to bash the book. Ms Allred's claim is that 'Lean In' (the title of Ms Sandberg's book) is a thinly veiled attempt to blame women for their own predicament. The basic premise of the book (I haven't read it yet), appears to be that women are not self-confident enough and that career choices for women are often about compromise, some of which are compromises that male colleagues do not have to make.
Instead, Ms Allred (in numerous radio interviews) appears to claim that the proper role of women who achieve in the workplace should be to encourage the enlistment of collective bargining (e.g., unions), to eliminate compromises and to help all women to achieve rather than to promote more self-confidence among women (since women are chided for being self-confident in the work place) and allow women make any career/family choices since they should be able to have it all.
An interesting spin on Ms Sandberg's book. One wonders if she meant that women should be submitting themselves to the male-dominated union power structure rather than promote their own accomplishments individually? I'm not sure if that's exactly how that's supposed to work out... Anyhoo... To each their own politics...
... as shown in the Showtime documentary "House of lies".
lucm, indeed.
Sheryl Sandberg. Proving the truth that if you have a successful family member, you can glom onto them and somehow be considered a successful pioneer for sheer luck.
This was in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine. As I get older (not old...older) it surprises me how our society automatically makes assumptions about what it means to be successfull and how those assumptions always seem to glorify to work. Work, work, work, work. For beings with limited lifespans it seems like such a waste of time and energy.
"Is There Life After Work?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/is-there-life-after-work.html?_r=0
Erin Callan is the former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers
(she was forced out before they went bankrupt...)
Former CFO of Lehman Brothers is now crying over the loss of her marriage and lack of a family. Oh, boo hoo. Psychotic, the lot of them.
How are the women responsible ("allowing themselves to be cheapened") when it is men making bone-headed (pun intended) decisions?
You should just ignore that useless dry cunt! (Goria Allred)
Who really gives a shit about this?
http://imgur.com/gallery/4zEEW4B
But when the head of Microsoft's Windows Engineering is a woman ... Julie Larson-Green ... the media should pay a little more attention.
I missed the NPR broadcast today, nor have I seen Gloria Allred's accounts; but I saw Sheryl Sandberg as a keynote at the Grace Hopper conference in 2011, and she actually did a solid speech on a very similar topic. IIRC, she discussed the challenges and compromises that women make in technology or other male-dominated field; but she also discussed how that landscape can change, and how women can achieve success both with their family and in a career, similar to your summation of Ms Allred's points. I'm not sure if Allred was trying to make family/career balance come across as utopian, but I'd take what I heard during Sandberg's keynote more to heart because it is, in fact, not an easy balance to achieve... It goes so far beyond needing an unbiased employer; you also need your sig o's unwavering support, and be able to handle the possibility of living a less traditional (non-hallmark) kind of life. Forget social stigmas within the workplace when there is a giant elephant in the room regarding the roles/duties between husband and wife/mother and father.
Statistics like. "85% of board seats are held by men, so clearly there's a long way to go" are highly misleading.
The underlying premise is that all things being equal, the seats should be 50% female. But that premise is silly.
If 75% of women elect to raise families and focus less on their careers (not a real statistic, just an example) then it would stand to reason that 25% would not hold equally senior positions to their male colleagues who pursued only career. And if women more frequently choose majors like psychiatry, French language, Art History and women's studies, then their lack of representation on boards of tech companies would also be justified.
This is the general problem with numerical male:female ratios: They discount the other options which draw women of their own free will, and misrepresent the existing ratio as "repression" of some kind.
The goal is NOT equal representation. It is equal OPPORTUNITY. If board seats were 50% women, that would likely represent male oppression as there are typically more men pursuing careers applicable to those seats than women. When women complain about unequal ratios they are demanding their cake while wanting to eat it too. They are actually demanding unequal favorable treatment for themselves at the expense of men.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I can't wait for the women who "take over" to completely sweep the people who helped them under the rug, and claim their success as a massive victory against the establishment that has been begging more of them to join for 60 years now.
I heard Sandberg on NPR and that got me thinking. We define success by using the traditionally male definition of success, namely overt power and earned money, Many more women raise children, do volunteer activities, or are under- or un-employed by choice than men because it is more socially acceptable for them to do that. In other words, unlike men they are not discriminated against by society for doing so. I have no doubt that many men would love to have the same opportunity. Also there are many more women that receive alimony than men. My ex-wife divorced me and despite being an alcoholic, the custody evaluator ruling that parenting during the marriage was joint, never having contributed a dime to the children's upbringing, an employment evaluation stating that she could make just as much money as me, and the fact that I now have the children more than she does was awarded alimony until I die. The amount is such that I will never be able to retire.
I'm not trying to discount the very real discrimination against women in the workplace but I think we need to be honest that both men and women are discriminated against by society. Maybe woman are discriminated against more now or maybe men are. The real problem is that people, individuals, are being treated unfairly.
because:
1. men are required to thanks to feminist 'equality' legislation. Unfortunately it does little but encourage another layer of systemic discrimination to form on top of claimed systemic discrimination.
2. men are instinctively inclined to place women on pedestals anyway..
3. today's 20 and 30 something men were brought up into neo-chivalry, which basically demands they give women 'equal' rewards while, at the same time, prop them up when they don't measure up, often to the point of taking the fall for her.
Gentlemen, you're right - I haven't looked closely at Xerox in a year or two. Ms. Burns had the right promoted-from-within credentials to run Xerox without grossly screwing it up, but it appears she did so anyway.
This just solidifies my plan to sell the Xerox stock I've had since 1988.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Marissa Mayer is a data dork who was hot and in the right place at the right time. Yes, her degrees are difficult to attain (with honors), but a degree doesn't mean **jack shit** to the profit margin.
Here's the problem with this article:
1. Superficial examination of women CEO's, omitted many examples (as stated above IBM's CEO and others)
2. Takes mainstream understanding of what a 'successful tech company' looks like. Business must have a sustainable profit model or they are nothing.
3. These women drive their companies into the ground. They take capital-building enterprises, outsource, cut workers, 'innovate', and then stop production of devices and go into "business services"...happens every time. The type of 'woman CEO' he profiles get their position because the **do as they are told** not b/c they can run a company.
Thank you Dave Raggett
My father recently passed out and fell frontally flat on the floor.
At the hospital the doctor and a psychologist took my mom apart to go over the facts of the incident.
The family physician explained that domestic violence against men is frequent and severe (weapons) corresponding to the deep wound and the bruises in the face of my dad.
Since domestic violence against men is almost never reported cross examination at emergency is routine.
Bow to the King...errr I mean the Queen...
Sounds like perfect leadership training to me. Have them swear fealty or off with their heads/careers.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
1. Men are required by law to hire pretty female candidates over qualified male ones? Not in my state anyway. Go into any software company and you will see 90% male engineers. Are they breaking the law?
2. Resist the urge to be a dumbass. Unless it is my wife, every woman in my life gets treated exactly the same as the men, especially at work. Men tend to put things on pedastals that they are trying to have sex with. Women at work should be out of bounds for any professional.
3. Speak for yourself. Equal rewards come with equal responsibility. This is pretty common sense, and I am willing to bit that just about every 20/30 something would agree.
IME men who put "their woman" on a pedestal tend to be the same ones who smack her around once the party guests leave. It makes no sense to me, but it always seems to be the same pattern.
I got a migraine waiting for people to spell it correctly.
(capcha was "coequal")
That all people should be free to choose the life they wish? Without barriers other than their own abilities??? If you choose to be a stay at home mom/dad/husband/wife - all power to you. If you choose not to, great.
(she was forced out before they went bankrupt...)
Which her incompetence helped to cause hence her forcing out.
I try to protect my friends, my family, and even my clients from the burden of undue stress and tedious work.
As much as I enjoy the work that I do, the requirement of doing it in order to survive is a burden.
I'm quite certain that one day the world will discover that working for a living results in a lesser life -- for some real value of lesser.
So, in short, I'm all for women working. But I'm not at all interested in equality. I want to stay home barefoot in the kitchen with life's great rewards -- i.e. food, shelter, and children. So if women want to take-over the burden of daily labour, let's help them to organize a plan to take it all.
I just can't believe anyone would fight so hard to work every day for their entire lives.
While we're at it, let's stop holding doors, paying for dinner, being polite, censoring verbal vulgarities, treating them kindly, smiling, and buying them gifts too. Clearly if they don't appreciate thousands of hours of annual work, let them take it all.
Woe! Equal rewards should come from equal performance, not responsibility. Although your sentence is correct about what really happens. If 1 manager gets a reward in one dept and is male and manager 2 in another dept. doesn't and has equal responsibility and is female, regardless of performance she can sue and win based on a claim of discrimination.
There arent too many people who on their deathbed wished they had worked more
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference to Godwin's Law approaches 1